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Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives

arxiv.org

11–20 of 56 posts

Re: Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives

#12
When I was a kid, I was involved in a study with UCSD. I grew up in California on a Commune in the 1970s very famous in the Bay area. The study with UCSD would follow a range of various people from all various socio-economic backgrounds.

I first recall going to San Diego when I was 3. They would check in on me every few years up until I was 18 and I asked to leave the study.

I don't recall what it was named... but it was interesting. I wont share the insights they had of me - but some of them were insulting and very wrong.

This will do that at scale.

Re: Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives

#16
post #9

I have mixed feelings about this. It could be a great tool to help people, but on past experience it seems more likely that HR departments/ financial service providers/ governments would use it to write people off if they have too many negative life indicators.

Every time we get better at things like this, all the power tends to stay with organizations, and individual people are lucky if they get anything out of it. Amazon, Wal-Mart, MacDonalds, giant banks, insurers, et c., analyze their competition, suppliers, and consumers in great detail with computer data and models. Where’s the widespread automated buyer’s agent for consumers, to balance that power so strongly that it…

Scraping is legal; as are assistive technologies.

What’s lacking is the collective willpower to develop social organizations, which could orchestrate and fund such efforts. There’s a complete lack of organization among the public.

The problem is neither technical nor legislative: people just don’t care to, and are happier accepting the status quo.

Re: Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives

#17
post #11

I wonder how an ethical board was convinced to allow this kind of research

It's surprising to see that this was done in Denmark, on data on more than the million people, and I couldn't find any reference to the ethical board/approvals in the manuscript

Re: Using sequences of life-events to predict human lives

#20

I have mixed feelings about this. It could be a great tool to help people, but on past experience it seems more likely that HR departments/ financial service providers/ governments would use it to write people off if they have too many negative life indicators.

I'd like to believe that lives are way too nuanced to properly train and evaluate a transformer this way. Also, I would wager that upon release, suddenly everybody says they eat healthy and exercise daily.

I have an acquaintance who is convinced that Google ads stalk him because the ads make inferences yet shouldn't be able to, like offering flight prices from one city to another he frequents when he's never done that search in Google before.

I've tried to explain to him that people aren't actually very unique in large models, and there's probably several signals Google does have from his other searches to conclude he's interested in those two cities.

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